Yesterday, following a short battle with an undisclosed illness, Dan O'Bannon sadly passed away aged 63. While his name should be vaguely familiar to cinemagoers as the writer and creator of Alien, to fans of genre films it should be tattooed somewhere on their person. O'Bannon was part of the fabric of genre films, a fixture. Though his star never rose above a certain elevation, in his own unassuming fashion he was a game-changer in more ways than Avatar will ever manage.

I've always had as much an interest in the nuts-and-bolts technical and artistic side of the movie-making process as in the finished films themselves. In the 1980s I wasn't alone: there were plenty of magazines, such as Cinefantastique, Fantastic Films and Starburst that were full of interviews with behind-the-camera workers. O'Bannon quickly became a familiar and welcome name in these circles – frequently interviewed, always fascinating and generous with information and opinion. Not only that, he had a great track record to back up such prominent standing.

As a film student at USC in 1970, he collaborated with classmate John Carpenter on a highly ambitious graduation short film. While most of their hippie-era friends were content to make films of their girlfriends hitch-hiking and the like, O'Bannon and Carpenter decided to make a science-fiction movie, shooting the hippies into outer space in what would eventually be expanded into the smart, cynical, low-budget classic Dark Star.

Dark Star didn't exactly set the world on fire but it did change O'Bannon's. Alejandro Jodorowsky saw the multitasking O'Bannon (on Dark Star he wrote, designed, acted and did the FX) as an untapped asset and hired him to supervise the special visual effects of his famous abortive adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. After six glorious months in Paris working with a team of artists assembled by Jodorowsky that included HR Giger, Chris Foss and Jean "Moebius" Girard, O'Bannon found himself back in LA, broke, depressed and reduced to sleeping on the couch of fellow screenwriting wannabe and sci-fi fan Ron Shusett. George Lucas was impressed enough with his hand-animated, faux computer screen graphics to hire him to do similar work on Star Wars, but otherwise this was an incredibly lean period for him. He was in a financial hole and with no other work coming in he would have to write his way out of it.

Noting that the rich, dark humour that permeated Dark Star wasn't generating many laughs at screenings, O'Bannon decided that while comedy is rather subjective, we're all, more or less, scared by the same things. He dusted off an old bit of writing he did about a second world war bomber crew under attack by "gremlins" (which would eventually emerge again in the film Heavy Metal) and spliced it on to a bug-monster action-horror script of his called They Bite and a rewrite of the comical alien hunt section of Dark Star (with vigorous nods to It! The Terror from Beyond Space, The Planet of the Vampires and AE Van Vogt's The Voyage of the Space Beagle) and, together with Shusett, knocked it into a spec script called The Star Beast.

This, of course, became Alien. Over the years, many connected with the film have greedily and not entirely accurately claimed credit for just about everything good about Alien. But if you search out the original script on the internet, you'll see most of it was already there courtesy of O'Bannon. He even wrote the roles as non-gender specific, which certainly did Sigourney Weaver a few favours. And, following Dune, O'Bannon had no problem in thinking of which artists Ridley Scott might want to consider for the landmark design of the movie.

As a writer, O'Bannon was adept at taking something standard and adding new twists to it. He may not have originated all the concepts he doled out, but he was usually the first to expand on them and think of how they could be realised in visual terms. Witness the vertical cities he and Moebius put forward in their futuristic comic-book short story The Long Tomorrow in a 1977 issue of Métal Hurlant, which was "borrowed" by Ridley Scott for Blade Runner.

O'Bannon's résumé is full of highly enjoyable genre movies that are full of interesting quirks and character, many co-written with Shusett. There's the downbeat and creepy zombie tale Dead and Buried, the paranoid, surveillance-themed helicopter movie Blue Thunder, and Lifeforce, the muddled but hugely entertaining adaptation of Colin Wilson's Space Vampires that mixes aliens, zombies, vampirism, spaceships, nudity and large-scale destruction of London.

There's also Total Recall, which managed to expand the Philip K Dick original into a high-action script that even managed to add a little ambiguity (Shusett and O'Bannon were way ahead of everyone in realising the cinematic potential of Dick's stories, picking up the rights to a few at a snip long before Scott's Blade Runner upped the price out of their range).

His directing career unfortunately never really got off the ground, but is still worth considering. As someone who had a hand in more or less every department in Dark Star, he wasn't one to delegate easily. As a result his directorial debut, The Return of the Living Dead, apparently wasn't much fun for anyone involved. The story is enjoyably told in B-movie actor Jewel Shepard's frank autobiography, If I'm So Famous, How Come Nobody's Ever Heard Of Me? – it's well worth tracking down a copy. The finished film, however, is great and was a "zomcom" long before Shaun of the Dead; it also had running zombies long before Zack Snyder "invented" them in his Dawn of the Dead remake. 1992's The Resurrected, the rather nifty HP Lovecraft adaptation, is O'Bannon's only other such credit.

At 63, O'Bannon still had much to offer. They Bite was yet again being mooted as a possible production and his book, The Rules of Writing, was still looking for a publisher (please, someone). When one who had achieved as much as O'Bannon passes, there's bittersweet relief to be found in being reminded of things you like that you may not have thought about recently. I think this clip from Dark Star is a good way to remember him and sums up much of what was great about his work. It may or may not be the first "video diary" in a film – a bit of shtick still around today in Avatar – but it is probably the funniest and most poignant. It also tells you everything you need to know about the character O'Bannon was playing, in a manner that is stylish, unexpected and economic, three qualities in short supply these days.